Measuring Extent of the New Movement

It's Beginning to look like a lot of Americans will be ushering in the New Year in a more sober fashion than they have in the recent past. If trends continue, there will be less drinking and fewer alcohol-related traffic fatalities this holiday season due largely to a heightened sensitivity to the dangers of drunken driving. In combination with the ongoing health and fitness movement and the changing drinking habits of an aging population, the five-year-old campaign against excessive drinking not only has lowered the number of deaths involving drunken driving but also has reduced per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages significantly.

President Reagan has described the heightened awareness about alcohol's dangers as a “great national movement.” The New York Times called it “the temperance wave.” David F. Musto, a medical professor, describes it as “a serious, effective and popular temperance movement.” Whether it is called a wave, a movement or simply an awareness, the anti-drunken driving campaign and its attendant temperance component continue to win new adherents. “I've never seen anything like the kind of interest and response of the country to any issue as I have [the fight against drunken driving],” said Dr. Morris Chafetz, president of the Health Education Foundation and a member of the Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving. “In my lifetime this country has only been united one other previous time around a single issue, and that was World War II.”

The campaign against drunken driving has had marked success in persuading federal, state and local governments to increase the legal drinking age, strengthen drunken driving statutes, institute restrictions on bars and set up drunken driver reporting programs. For example: